Can religion ever really be blamed?

[charlou]

again looking at the examples above they have another common denominator - the economic background in which they developed, poverty and for many hopelessness.

Ideological dogmatism, often religious, is a major contributing factor, actively preventing economic and intellectual development and progress for many backward, oppressed, "hopeless" cultures.

This can be exploited by those with greater economic resources and their own agendas, of course, further entrenching the "hopelessness" and creating the circumstances which breed radical extremism.

Your post made me think, more than that it almost persuaded me except that our time now is only a brief snapshot in history. If it was religion itself that stifled development and progress one would expect to see the first civilisations that arose having less religion - or religious memes, but that's not the case. Mayan culture was highly religious - I almost don't need to type the words because alongside the ancient civilisation ruins temples spring to mind as quickly as their geographical context. The Babylonians were highly religious polytheists but that didn't prevent them being (probably) the first to use the concept of zero, if not the number itself.

My contention is not that religion is helpful, or even that it isn't harmful, rather that it is more a product than cause. Religions change over time as does their adherence to a dogmatic versus a flexible approach, recent years have shown that just within the CofE. The existence of religion remains and yet the levels of dogmatism change which would surely indicate other, more potent, factors.

If religion is the cause what explains the changes in religion? Beyond that, if it is religion holding nations back how can we explain highly religious and advanced countries like the US? Causal relationships just look different - what can be observed in our brief snapshot of time seems closer to a correlation.

If religion is the cause what explains the changes in religion?

Religion, as you note, is not an absolute thing, it's evolved as we humans have evolved, and due to its memetic nature and human diversity religion has evolved and continues to evolve along a diversity of branches. It's probably unnecessary to go into the various theories about how and why religious thinking initially evolved as I'll assume most here are aware of those. Religious thinking exists. Religious thinking is faith rather than evidence based, ie assertively absolutist, not scientific. So, even though religion as an evolving phenomenon is not an absolute thing and changes and diversifies along with the various paradigms of the religious, religious thinking is rooted in absolutism, and in turn absolutist thinking is prone to manipulation and abuse, as well as to manipulate and abuse.



As an aside, floppit, have you read The God Delusion? In Chapter 8, WHAT'S WRONG WITH RELIGION? WHY BE SO HOSTILE?, Richard does a very good job of explaining his perspective on this subject. He covers:

Fundamentalism and the subversion of science (pg 282)

The dark side of absolutism (pg 286)

Faith and homosexuality (pg 289)

Faith and the sanctity of human life (pg 291)

The Great Beethoven Fallacy (pg 298)

How ‘moderation’ in faith fosters fanaticism (pag 301)

[floppit]

Hi Charlou, No I haven't read the god delusion - mostly because I'm already an atheist and isn't doesn't appeal to me when competing with books like 'The Brain That Changes Iteslf'. I really do think RD is an excellent scientist and would be far more likely to read his books on zoology and genes than his texts on religion. I've been convinced religion is twaddle for decades!

Please remember I'm not suggesting religion is a good thing, it's wrong, religion is wrong, faith over reason is a painful mistake. Where we differ is in the importance we give to religion rather than reasoning. My contention is that faith is less hard work than reasoning, that people choose to follow a faith based path because it's easier - like followers of Aiden Pangelly (sp?), the faith healer recently featured on rogue traders. Belief in god without reason is no worse than being an atheist without reason, for both there are those may take the role of teacher but unless the listeners have put effort into their own thought processes, unless they are actively working to improve their own skills, they're no better off - the Pope or Chairman Mao, it makes no difference.

If I had a choice of schools for my girl (and I admit this choice would never happen!), one school that had prayers every morning and threw in a couple of hymms BUT in addition each morning it covered one of the common fallacies and explained it well or a wholly secular school that had neither prayers nor explicit teaching of reasoning (otherwise exact same curriculum) - my girl would be on her knees each morning. Religion cannot withstand reasoning, it never has and it is the desire to retain power despite that rather than the religion itself that has led to conflicts between science and faith. As Seraph points out while religion was the most reasonable idea so far conjured up it backed science.

[charlou]

Hi floppit.

As Seraph points out while religion was the most reasonable idea so far conjured up it backed science.

I don't think that's what Seraph meant, but will leave him to comment on that.

If your idea of 'proto-science' involves taking speculation and merely asserting it as fact, without actively testing it and despite forthcoming evidence to the contrary, which is what religious belief has always done, that is quite different to science as we know it, and religion has never backed science as we know it. Humans had questions and their religious thinking recognised the questions and adopted speculative answers as absolute answers. Religious belief may have been our way of satisfying our insipient nascent and developing intellectual curiosity, lazily as you say, but it has always been assertively absolute, not falsifiably scientific.





Edit: replaced 'insipient' with 'nascent' (oops)

[charlou]

I've edited the above post to correct an error and add afterthoughts.

[Thinking Aloud]

My contention is that faith is less hard work than reasoning, that people choose to follow a faith based path because it's easier...

Never a truer word spoken.

Which is easier to understand, this, with its complicated words concepts and ideas, that one might have to do some study to understand...:

The formation and evolution of the Solar System is estimated to have begun 4.6 billion years ago with the gravitational collapse of a small part of a giant molecular cloud. Most of the collapsing mass collected in the centre, forming the Sun, while the rest flattened into a protoplanetary disc out of which the planets, moons, asteroids, and other small Solar System bodies formed...

The current scientific consensus is that the complex biochemistry that makes up life came from simpler chemical reactions, but it is unclear how this occurred...

All organisms on Earth are descended from a common ancestor or ancestral gene pool. Current species are a stage in the process of evolution, with their diversity the product of a long series of speciation and extinction events. The common descent of organisms was first deduced from four simple facts about organisms: First, they have geographic distributions that cannot be explained by local adaptation. Second, the diversity of life is not a set of completely unique organisms, but organisms that share morphological similarities. Third, vestigial traits with no clear purpose resemble functional ancestral traits, and finally, that organisms can be classified using these similarities into a hierarchy of nested groups - similar to a family tree. However, modern research has suggested that, due to horizontal gene transfer, this "tree of life" may be more complicated than a simple branching tree since some genes have spread independently between distantly related species.

(My bold - all bits copied from Wikipedia)

or this:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth...

And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so...

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

?

[floppit]

TA - yes, those are very good examples.

I'll leave Seraph to comment further but the difference between the two readings of what he's written don't fundamentally change my response, my point wasn't so much about whether religion has ever supported science, or acted to forward it, more that attitude towards science shown by religious institutions has at it's heart whether it suits them in terms of gaining/retaining power, in other words the reaction to science is not because of 'faith' first and foremost, but rather the acquisition of power - hence religious institutions attempt to nobble the competing religions as much as they do science itself.

On a less cynical note, I'm sure at the helm their are also those who utterly believe what they preach, lazy thinkers enjoying the adulation given by other lazy thinkers for their slightly more skilled use of rhetoric. For a non religious (or more accurately, less so) example have a look at the author M. Scott Peck, or S. Freud - both attracted huge followings while relying almost utterly on rhetorical theorising without any substantial evidence base. I'm sure both had the ability, if not the desire, to have worked more methodically, but the outcome would probably have been less attractive to the herds of followers they actually attracted, because working from an evidence base produces more complex ideas. It's this desire for the shortcut that's our problem not the actual shortcut chosen.

[FBM]

Greatly expressed, FBM, but I disagree. According to you, ideas cannot be blamed, because they have no independent existence from humans. That doesn't make the ideas less subject to blame. It simply makes those who use them as an excuse, responsible. But to exonerate the ideas from the cause of the problem, and simply holding the user or the actor as the only guilty part, is a minimal solution.
One example: an act of racism will have the person who committed it responsible of the wrongness of the act. But if you don't address the idea of racism in a more global frame, there can not be sensible hopes of eliminating those acts. Same thesis with gender injustice and homophobia. And with religion.
The fact that something has no real physical existence, doesn't mean that it has no repercussion in the real world. And if those repercussions cause suffering, they must be targeted and prevent that they influence others.

I also disagree about the amorality of atheism. My sense of justice, my pity and my empathy towards suffering didn't disappear at becoming an atheist. Call those feelings morality or any other way, and may they come from evolution or from social indoctrination, they are there, and that makes me a moral being.

Some memes are real viruses as religion is. And my atheist stance is, if I can't eradicate them, I'll try to prevent their propagation and contagion... But that is a personal decision...

I see your point and I don't exactly disagree with what you're saying. I think it's just that I conceptualize it a smidgen differently. Also, I didn't express myself very precisely, either. What I meant by an "amoral universe" is that there is no objective standard of morality, ie, a super-being that mandates right and wrong. We make right and wrong. Another way to say it is that we make it up. Not arbitrarily, but still, it's a product of human cognitive endeavor.

As for ethics, is it not true that only beings with some freedom of choice are morally accountable? Religion is not in itself a sentient being, therefore to blame religion in the sense of holding it morally accountable is, strictly speaking, absurd. But you and I agree that people must be held morally accountable. For example, when we try to cure an abstract phenomenon like a specific disease in general, we actually treat individual people who are ill.

Like I said, I'm convinced we actually agree, but just conceptualize it differently.

[lordpasternack]

I haven't read the whole thread, but I can see that it is kind of taking a dispute over the sort of claim that "guns don't kill people - people do."

Anyway, I'm going to kind of cheat and enter a copypasta job of my own words (some of which were copypasta originally from a PM) into this thread:

http://www.richarddawkins.net/forum/vie ... 5#p2288697

First part is a reasonable question. When I say ‘religion’ it’s my shorthand for theistic religion or anything involving the supernatural. Non theistic ‘religions’ and those not involving hocus pocus, I couldn’t give a toss about.

Interesting. I personally would have to say that I don't find theism in and of itself all that offensive, and I find the traits that often blight official religion to be just as offensive when they occur in an atheistic setting: Such as in the case of 'Marxist' dictatorships, where children are systematically indoctrinated and encouraged to be unquestioning in all that they are taught, and particularly in their allegiance to their leader, and the leader's secret police patrols at night to purge the streets of 'infidels', and probably torture and kill them. There's no theistic god involved, and no 'hocus pocus' per se - but it still stinks of religion, and it essentially is, in my view.

Irrationality, unquestioning faith, tribalism - and anything else you may care to mention, are just as repugnant when they aren't tied to a sky fairy.

You may like this little quote that I composed in a PM to a member of this forum not long ago:

I've actually been pondering over the past x months, on and off, on what religion actually is - as in how it could be defined. It's something that doesn't even require a transcendent "god" to operate. Of course it doesn't - the areas in our brains that prime us for religion are not specifically allocated as "god spots" - but as spots containing the various entirely worldly human animal traits that weave together to form what we commonly recognise as religion. All you need a canny individual at the top with an insatiable lust for power and a few other characteristics to boot. And the people involved each time all seem to follow exactly the same behavioural patterns as though they were reading it from a script. It's quite intriguing.

Religion is a whole group of potent memes all clumped together as one rather toxic mixture: The tendency for good people to commit atrocious deeds when told to by a higher authority (alla Milgram); the tendency to be tribal and territorial; the tendency (in some) to want an alpha authority figure at the head of the society; not to mention the odd tendency to want to believe so hard that one will just continue making up excuses to explain away why something doesn't appear to be so - and in some cases flinging one's belief system right into the realm of the unfalsifiable (outside space and time, invisible, happens to prefer one's blind faith over revealling itself to one) in order to save it - to name just a few of the traits that continue with repititious predictability...

They are all familiar traits, and they all exist independently outside of religion. Religion just tends to be the sum many/all of them convolved. I think, anyway...

People behave differently in different environmental situations (as is evidenced by a number of psychological experiments, not least the Milgram Experiment and the Stanford Prison Experiment). Religion is kind of like a tapestry of psychological environments that many humans chain themselves to and then repeatedly reinforce - in some cases threatening themselves and others with the constant watchful gaze and potential punishment of an almighty sky-daddy; as well as punishments from other members of the tribe (because sky-daddy needs them to do his dirty work too); and potential blights upon their wellbeing after this life.

And then the more zealous slaves often dutifully beat it firmly into the labile minds of their children, and keep all curiosity nipped in the bud, because sometimes the only way of preserving perverse notions about the world is to avoid to many questions arising from any minds in your vicinity. And intertwined with that are various pieces of doctrine and dogma with set-piece opinions for believers to swallow and regurgitate. It would be absurd, IMHO, to think that people involved in religion aren't somewhat affected in their thoughts and behaviour as a result of their engaging in this particular psychological bag of tricks.

It's rather like a proverbial gun, in my view. It's capable of good and evil and best at least kept in good, honest hands (even if it is something of a perversity in the first place). And you can never blame it for a crime, though it is sometimes the medium of crimes. You can't know whether those crime would still have happened without the gun present, but you might want to venture that it wouldn't have been so severe, and push for guns to become less numerous on the streets, and particularly from being pushed on kids.

[charlou]

Hi Charlou, No I haven't read the god delusion - mostly because I'm already an atheist and isn't doesn't appeal to me when competing with books like 'The Brain That Changes Iteslf'. I really do think RD is an excellent scientist and would be far more likely to read his books on zoology and genes than his texts on religion. I've been convinced religion is twaddle for decades!

I didn't point the book out to you because I think you need convincing that religion is twaddle. The chapter that I mentioned is actually pertinent to the topic of this thread, which appears to be one that does appeal to you.

[Pappa]

"guns don't kill people - people do."

Actually, it's Rappers!

[Animavore]

I blame religion for the untenable position I'm in now.

The wankers.

[Feck]

"guns don't kill people - people do."

Actually, it's Rappers!

GLC your local band ?

[Pappa]

"guns don't kill people - people do."

Actually, it's Rappers!

GLC your local band ?

Just up the road in Newport.
Sorry for the derail, I couldn't resist.

[floppit]

I must admit - I really hope others enjoyed the debate here as much as I have, I want to say thanks for a challenging, fun but very polite thread.

I know that the issue of whether it's semantics has come up, whether it matters at all is something worth questioning. From my point of view it is important to challenge things that are often said, not necessarily to disprove them but to look more closely and see what substance there is or isn't behind them. I've done a lot of thinking since the thread began, the analogy of a virus was a powerful one for me, a virus is harmful, is spread, and can be fought in it's own right. I would acknowledge that religion has some of the same qualities but that it is one of many viruses (memes) that run counter to rational thinking. Like a virus once something is as widespread as religion it easily becomes the focus of attention even if there are other strains less common that are equally dangerous.

I would argue that the thing making people vulnerable to religion also makes them vulnerable to anti vaccine rumours, CAM, belief in ghosts, superstition, racism, fandom and tabloid reporting! If religion is removed but the vulnerability remains the gap is filled just as quickly and no progress made. For me the answer is to look at what creates the weakness that allows the virus to cause harm and that includes a whole load of boring pragmatic action rather aligning myself in a clear anti religion battle. I still think the latter is a mistake, with people like Bill Maher receiving the RD award I can only guess that the war on religion has firmly trumped the battle for reason. (See S. Novella's article below re Bill Maher's anti vaccine pro CAM views).
http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=1069

I do not believe that religion can withstand rationality and solid reasoning so I see no downside in placing all efforts to promote those features and wasting none worrying about eradicating one of a whole host of dangerous viral memes. Once a virus reaches pandemic status containment is a futile primary defence - vaccination and treatment trump control over the spread.

[charlou]

I must admit - I really hope others enjoyed the debate here as much as I have, I want to say thanks for a challenging, fun but very polite thread.

I know that the issue of whether it's semantics has come up, whether it matters at all is something worth questioning. From my point of view it is important to challenge things that are often said, not necessarily to disprove them but to look more closely and see what substance there is or isn't behind them. I've done a lot of thinking since the thread began, the analogy of a virus was a powerful one for me, a virus is harmful, is spread, and can be fought in it's own right. I would acknowledge that religion has some of the same qualities but that it is one of many viruses (memes) that run counter to rational thinking. Like a virus once something is as widespread as religion it easily becomes the focus of attention even if there are other strains less common that are equally dangerous.

I would argue that the thing making people vulnerable to religion also makes them vulnerable to anti vaccine rumours, CAM, belief in ghosts, superstition, racism, fandom and tabloid reporting! If religion is removed but the vulnerability remains the gap is filled just as quickly and no progress made. For me the answer is to look at what creates the weakness that allows the virus to cause harm and that includes a whole load of boring pragmatic action rather aligning myself in a clear anti religion battle. I still think the latter is a mistake, with people like Bill Maher receiving the RD award I can only guess that the war on religion has firmly trumped the battle for reason. (See S. Novella's article below re Bill Maher's anti vaccine pro CAM views).
http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=1069

I do not believe that religion can withstand rationality and solid reasoning so I see no downside in placing all efforts to promote those features and wasting none worrying about eradicating one of a whole host of dangerous viral memes. Once a virus reaches pandemic status containment is a futile primary defence - vaccination and treatment trump control over the spread.

You have my full agreement, there, floppit. Very well put, and thank you.